Thursday, April 12, 2012

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” - Leonardo da Vinci

I would imagine that some of you must be wondering if we've had a change of plans regarding cruising. After all, it's been months since we've done any significant sailing or work on our neglected sailboat, Nirvana. We post inspirational stuff on our Facebook page and share pretty pictures, but are we really doing anything to make our dream of cruising a reality?! Well, we are NOT changing our plans!

Even though our posts haven't really been related to making the transition to cruising lately, we've been working towards our dream! We're STILL always talking and planning.

Unlike a lot of cruising sites out there, we didn't start our blog once we knew that we had everything figured out. When we first decided to work towards the cruising lifestyle, I surfed the Internet for sites about regular people like us who had to overcome a lot of obstacles to make their cruising dream come true. However, I found that most of the popular cruising blogs were started after all the obstacles of becoming cruisers were overcome. I did find a few cruising blogs that started "from the beginning", but boy did they make it sound easy! Just put a "For Sale" sign in the front yard, place an ad for a garage sale, and move onto the sailboat within a few months!

Well, unfortunately that's not our story! Unlike most future cruisers, we've had a lot of extra obstacles like only "one day weekends" for months, working in construction (Ken) which requires a lot of physical labor, no vacation or sick pay to take time off to complete the required renovations on our house to sell it, deadbeat tenants that suck up our savings every time we turn around, and on and on.

Anyway, we do have a plan! Ken's been working his butt off lately just so we can save up enough money for him to take 4-6 weeks off to get our house ready for sale. Although we are still having rental problems as I write this, we hope that we have things under control!

The plan is to work till the end of the month, then take a much needed vacation to St. Thomas to rest and recharge! After a week in the Virgin Islands (thanks to credit card miles we've saved for 3 years), we plan on dedicating the majority of May to finishing up on house. We'll still have to squeeze in some work at our regular jobs to make a living, but our house will be priority! This summer we plan on sticking that sign in the yard!

So, that's our plan! We hope that sharing our obstacles throughout our journey to cruising will be inspirational to the many others that are faced with overwhelming difficulties in reaching their dream. After all, this isn't a reality show ... this is real life! It ain't easy, but most things in life that are worthwhile require discipline, hard work and perseverance.

The quote by Leonardo da Vinci above pretty much says it all. We could easily give up and let life happen to us! However, we continue to roll up our sleeves, face every challenge thrown at us, and keep moving forward!

This weekend, we're working on our rental to have it ready for our new tenants right before we go on vacation. It will be nice to have that behind us ... for now!

9 comments:

I think you are making awesome progress! Enjoy the VIs. What mileage program credit card do you use? I don't have one but thinking about it... I really want to go on another sailing charter in the carribean and miles for the thousand dollar airfares would be huge!

Just found your blog while searching for people doing the same thing as we are, and who are not already out there cruising. We, too, are in the midst of our plan to cast off the land ties and felt like blogging about that process was just as important as blogging about all the fun we'll have once we're free. I think it's harder to make these choices during mid life because of all the responsibilities we have such as houses, kids in college, careers, etc. So we're 'in the same boat' with you two! Glad I found your blog and glad to follow along. Come visit us over at www.LittleCunningPlan.com and we can compare notes. Looking forward to catching up with your blog.

Just getting caught up on your blogs and came across this one. Keep up the good work! You'll get there! We left "real life" before we had reached our financial goal simply because work as getting too slow to make it worthwhile. I wanted to mention that I think a lot of folks don't talk about the time leading up to the great adventure because it's not really something that can be mentioned around work and co-workers. We never mentioned our plans at the office or in the blog until we severed the dock-lines. Hope to see yo out here soon!Verenawww.pacificsailors.com

Thanks Verena! Like you, "real life" has been too much of a struggle so we may as well "struggle" in paradise! We continue to have our ups n downs but we're making progress.

Although we've started our blog "from the beginning", we know what you mean about keeping it quiet. A lot of my co-workers and acquaintances have no idea of our site .. or plan! It just seems easier that way. However, we did tell our family so they'd have time to deal with it ... LOL!